Ruth Helen Mottram (born 1978) is a British and Danish climate scientist and glaciologist who serves as a Senior Climate Scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and Honorary Professor at Aarhus University's Department of Environmental Science. She is a recognized expert on the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice sheet, climate modelling, and ice sheet–atmosphere interactions. Mottram is a contributing author to the IMBIE team, whose work quantifying ice sheet loss has been published in Nature and other high-impact journals. She was also a contributing author to the IPCC's fifth assessment report on Greenland mass budget and her work on Antarctic ice sheet mass budget was the basis of figure showing this in the working group 1 of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. She is frequently cited in international media as an expert on Arctic climate change and contributes annual updates on the state of the Greenland ice sheet to Carbon Brief.
Her research focuses on developing regional climate models (particularly HIRHAM and HCLIM) to understand ice sheet surface mass balance, glacier dynamics, and the impacts of climate change on polar regions. Mottram is a member of the Polar Portal team, which provides near real-time monitoring of the Arctic cryosphere, and contributes to the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative for the Greenland ice sheet.
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Early life and education
Mottram studied geography at the University of Edinburgh, earning a master of art's degree in 2000. She then completed a Master of Research in the natural environment, where her research on tor formation and the exposure history of the Cairngorm Plateau utilized cosmogenic beryllium-10 and aluminium-26 to date terrestrial landforms and quantify bedrock erosion rates. After working briefly in exploration at Shell, she pursued a doctorate in glaciology at the University of St Andrews. Her PhD research, completed in 2008, tested theories of crevasse formation on glaciers and developed a widely used parameterization for calving in ice sheet models.